Robert M. Coates's Yesterday's Burdens

[BONUS Letter.] A long-forgotten recession indicator...

Robert M. Coates. Yesterday’s Burdens. Southern Illinois UP, 1975 [1933]. 275 pp.

“Passing a Chock Full O’ Nuts shop,” says the narrator near the end of Yesterday’s Burdens, “I encountered a girl, just issuing from the door. She wore a tight gray coat; her face was plump and petulant; her eyes, round and blue, were intriguingly magnified by thick-lensed nose glasses.”

Of interest to us here is not this “remarkably attractive creature,” one of many street-level figures noted by this author, but the “Chock Full O’ Nuts shop.”

The action of this novel is set in New York City in 1932, so Chock Full o’Nuts stores were still pretty new, and they had just begun to sell their famous cheap coffee and “nutted cheese” sandwiches over the lunch counter, as a response to the Great Depression.

This brand of “heavenly” coffee has seen a boost in sales, since it isn’t part of Trump II’s tariffs, speaking of economic crises. Maybe this brand is yet another recession indicator…

“Chock full o’ nuts” is a good description for this, the second novel by Robert M. Coates as well. It’s a bunch of sketches and quasi-false starts whose only connective tissue is the narrator, a book reviewer who lives a little upstate but frequently visits Manhattan’s high society.

How is Robert M. Coates not a more familiar name, considering the load-bearing role he’s played in recent cultural history? A New Yorker contributor who’s credited with coining “Abstract Expressionism” to describe mid-century painting; an American expat promoting high modernism along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway; the man who was boxing partners with the latter, and introduced him to Gertrude Stein!

Yesterday’s Burdens got a recent reissue from Tough Poets Press, and the art deco look to the cover art is honestly quite appropriate. This is a sleek modernism ritz’d up for interwar high fashion.

It is the hour of (twilight on the world; the mists begin to fall and (twilight: dying the day that has been sad and long. The darkness deepens and (the shades of night fast falling: weary the heart now but sweet the song as (in the mellow eventide. Only the firelight gleaming as, dimly) the twilight and sweetly dreams of dead days, of still-loved voices, passed beyond recall. A lady is seated at the piano, remembering a song and the lips that sang it as, softly) the brooding twilight: low to her heart softly singing, the twilight) shadows softly come and go. Her dream is of love; and weaving into her dream comes (sweetly) love’s old song. It is the hour of) twilight: her fingers have fallen from the keys.